Sammy Duddy

Sammy Duddy (25 August 1945-17 October 2007) was an Ulster Defense Association leader during The Troubles.

Biography
Sammy Duddy was born in Belfast, County Antrim, Northern Ireland on 25 August 1945 to a large family of Ulster Protestants, the son of a World War II veteran from County Londonderry. Duddy was a drag queen actor in Belfast before joining the Ulster Defense Association on its formation in 1971, and he never took much of a military role in the UDA. He worked on Andy Tyrie's staff, and Tyrie had him drop his drag act and grow a mustache and speak with a deeper voice to distance him from the Kincora Boys' Home child sex abuse scandal of 1980. He retired from active loyalism during the 1990s, and he was nearly assassinated by a pipe bomb in 2002, the same year that some of Johnny Adair's men killed his pet chihuahua Bambi and wounded his other dog, Pepsi, in a drive-by shooting on Duddy's home. Duddy died of a heart attack in 2007 at the age of 62.